Jago by Kim Newman

Author:Kim Newman [Newman, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781164242
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2013-01-07T20:47:00+00:00

5

A group emerged from the Agapemone, clustered as if shooting their way out of a prison yard. They straggled down the steps around him. Still too bewildered by Sister Janet’s active tongue to keep up, Paul recognized Allison, wilder even than this morning, and Terry, hanging back like an inreserve, off-duty berserker. There were others, a gulping lad pulling a straw hat down on his head, a girl with a tall hairstyle and a Morticia Addams facial. And Allison’s original boyfriend, Ben. The whole crew unnerved Paul. He felt the memory of Terry’s blunt blade at his neck. It was unusual to find such variety in a kid group, he knew. A biker, a goth, a poseur, a grebo and feral Allison. Even in the diversity of the festival, like cult stuck with like. That was the whole point of cults, to be alike, uniform.

Allison saw him, and stretched a smile over her sharp teeth. The goth raised a Fu Manchu eyebrow and fluttered laquered black nails under her chin. The thing these kids had in common was that they were dangerous. Bored and brutal. Everyday evil. The type Paul would have walked past in a hurry with his head down on the Brighton seafront after closing time. They had predator eyes, bloody mouths. Surrounded by the festival crowd, Paul guessed there was no immediate danger. And Allison, he imagined, had some sort of scary soft spot for him.

Beside him, Sister Janet smiled and extended her hands to the kids.

‘We share Love,’ she said, again.

Allison, blinking in the last daylight, laughed in the woman’s face. Janet turned the other cheek, a Christian martyr beyond the reach of cruelty. A Moonie sex kitten, she was probably beyond the reach of anything.

Ben looked directly into his face, his glance a punch in the pit of Paul’s stomach. The world did a simultaneous backtrack and zoom, ground falling like an airliner hitting a pocket of turbulence.

‘Nice to see you,’ Ben said, teeth shining.

He had not seen the boy up close before. At the Pottery, he’d been in heavy shadows. In thinking the biker suffered from a bad birthmark or scar-mottled skin, Paul had been wrong. At some point, Ben had been soaked in acid or burned to death. He wasn’t a natural thing. Like the Martian war machine, he could not be, but was…

‘To see you…’

His face was an open wound, slimily red with ridges of exposed bone like tribal scars. And he wore a ragged sleeveless jacket that stank. It was uncured pink hide, falling apart and dripping. Even if he wasn’t an Angel from Hell, he could pass for an extra from Biker Zombie Holocaust.

‘…nice.’

Paul looked away, and saw Janet still smiling. She couldn’t see anything wrong with Ben. Looking directly at the biker, she appeared to be seeing a normal person. Not everyone saw what he saw, Paul suddenly realized. Everyone saw things differently. He looked back at Ben to be sure, and the dead boy was walking away, followers with him.

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